galaxy formation tagged posts

What is the origin of gold, silver, platinum? Credit: © alexphoto71 / Fotolia

The origin of many of the most precious elements on the periodic table, such as gold, silver and platinum, has perplexed scientists for >6 decades. Now a recent study has an answer, evocatively conveyed in the faint starlight from a distant dwarf galaxy. In a roundtable discussion The Kavli Foundation spoke to 2 of the researchers behind the discovery about why the source of these heavy elements, collectively called “r-process” elements, has been so hard to crack.

“Understanding how heavy, r-process elements are formed is one of hardest problems in nuclear physics,” said Assistant/Prof Anna Frebel, MIT...

The 50-meter diameter Large Millimeter Telescope is the largest, most sensitive single-aperture instrument in the world for studying star formation. Operated jointly by UMass Amherst and Mexico’s Instituto Nacional de Astrofísica, Óptica y Electrónica, it was recently used to observe the most luminous galaxies ever seen. Credit: UMass Amherst/Smith College/James Lowenthal

The newly observed galaxies are about 10 billion years old and were formed only about 4 billion years after the Big Bang. In categorizing luminous sources, astronomers call an infrared galaxy “ultra-luminous” when it has a rating of about 1 trillion solar luminosities, and that rises to about 10 trillion solar luminosities at the “hyper-luminous” level...

Artist’s illustration of turbulent winds of gas swirling around a black hole. Some of the gas is spiraling inward, but some is being blown away.

New research led by astrophysicists at York University has revealed the fastest winds ever seen at UV wavelengths near a supermassive black hole. “We’re talking wind speeds of 20% the speed of light, which is more than 200 million kilometres an hour. That’s equivalent to a category 77 hurricane,” says Jesse Rogerson, York U. “And we have reason to believe that there are quasar winds that are even faster.”

Astronomers have known about the existence of quasar winds since the late 1960s. At least 1 in 4 quasars have them...

Galaxy NGC 6052, located around 230 million light-years away in the constellation of Hercules.

This image, taken with the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 on board the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, shows the galaxy NGC 6052, located around 230 million light-years away in the constellation of Hercules. t would be reasonable to think of this as a single abnormal galaxy, and it was originally classified as such. However, it is in fact a “new” galaxy in the process of forming. Two separate galaxies have been gradually drawn together, attracted by gravity, and have collided. We now see them merging into a single structure.

As the merging process continues, individual stars are thrown out of their original orbits and placed onto entirely new paths, some very distant from the region of the collis...